Category: Automation

Owie 🙁 I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately. The other day our four year old came in and had a sore finger. “Daddy!” she yelled as she burst into the office. “Karisa (the two year old) slammed my finger in the door it’s really owie!” I inspected it while she danced around. It… Read more

Awhile back I had the chance to get an amazing deal on Lego bricks. Having 4 daughters, my wife and I notice when there’s a chance to give our girls something educational to play with. I ended up getting 40 pounds of Lego bricks from a lady whose kids were old enough that they weren’t… Read more

I read this article recently, on making sure that your automation isn’t stale. Tests, like food, work best when they’re fresh. When trying to figure out how to get an automation suite under control–getting rid of staleness–I like to visualize it as a hedge. We generally throw out stale food, but a hedge can be trimmed… Read more

A client had a bunch of Cucumber tests that ran from a Jenkins job. Running these took 90 minutes, even when spread across many nodes. This was too long to get fast enough feedback, so it ran only a few times per day. And it wasn’t in sync with any developer check-ins either. … Read more

When an automation solution no longer works well, companies have a choice. They can either keep trying to work with it, or they can switch to a new solution. Many companies choose the former. As more time, money and energy gets spent on one solution, it becomes harder to make a change. And the longer… Read more

Many companies already have an open-source test automation solution in place. But many of them know they’re not getting the most out of it. Sometimes it’s due to high maintenance. Sometimes it’s how fast tests get created. Other times it’s a limited number of people who can write the tests. If some, or all, of those… Read more

For every software company, there comes a time where the testing team won’t be able to move any faster. There’s only so much testing that can happen and still hit reasonable deadlines. That same company will usually solve this with test automation. Either they’ll hire one or more automation engineers, or buy an external tool.… Read more

So I saw a LinkedIn post the other day saying “Please stop writing frameworks from scratch”. It ended up being a product plug for yet another tool claiming to do everything needed for test automation. I get why this tool, and dozens of others, keep coming out. I’m sure a lot of it is because… Read more